March 5, 2010: Snippets from other nature and photo blogs . . . and a related Flickr fave.
Many thanks to ucumari for licensing this photo of a bobcat under Creative Commons.
Bobcat - © ucumari/Flickr CC
- I love checking out Trish Carney’s bobcat images at Wild Lives. I’ve seen only a few bobcats during my time in California, so I’m still looking for that closeup experience with this furtive animal. One of these days, I may find myself eye to eye with a gorgeous feline in the scrub. In the meantime, I’ve lived vicariously through Trish’s photo journals, her images taken mostly on Mt. Tam. They capture these animals in all of their splendor.
- Urban Hawks is a super-cool New York city blog dealing, primarily, with raptors in the city. But Bruce’s latest posts cover urban coyotes in Central Park and other parts of the city. He has some beautiful shots of the coyote in snow, on ice, traveling in the park. And he’s also putting in a plug for more awareness and education on the topic of urban predators like coyotes. These poor canines get a bum rap and I’m over-joyed when someone takes up their cause.
- As a follow-up to my recent post on bird baths, check out Steve Borichevsky’s Shooting My Universe blog and his stellar images of Common Eiders sharing a bath (as birds will do).
- Dr. Nancy Kay who writes the Speaking for Spot blog has a post on getting financial help to pay for veterinary bills. You can read her piece here. The embedded link to the financial page will take you to a dead end — so try this one instead.
- You know I’m not one to give a plug to hunting blogs. I have too many encounters with hunters and injured animals to feel remotely reconciled to the sounds of guns and scenes of carnage in the woods. But through a friend, I landed on a newish blog by Tovar Cerulli. Cerulli is a veggie-turned-hunter who’s exploring issues of ethics and compassion in hunting. His latest post is Gone Killing. I’ve had hunters tell me many times that I can’t possibly understand the outdoors, simply because I choose not to kill as part of my outdoors experience. Tovar’s post refutes this in a way — suggesting that stillness with nature is what creates that profound connection we share with other beings and with this earth. I agree. Hunters and I just part ways where shots are fired in that same stillness.
Hi Ingrid –
Thanks for the plug for my blog and for the other links above.
A few years ago I chanced onto a pair of bobcat kittens in the woods about a mile from home here in Vermont. What a thrilling encounter! I first learned about bobcats (their tracks, habits, etc) from Susan Morse, founder of Keeping Track, who is dedicated to conservation of large areas of habitat and corridors between them, especially for species such as bobcat, bear, and cougar. She also happens to be a deer hunter.
Tovar, thanks for stopping by. I like hearing stories like Susan’s, where there’s a confluence in thought among all of us who believe in habitat conservation and wildlife protection. Thanks for that tidbit.
I should probably mention two other things about Sue Morse: (1) She, too, is a fantastic photographer. If you get a chance to see any of her wildlife photography, especially of bobcat, lynx, and cougar, you’ll see what I mean. (2) When I first met her a dozen years ago, I was still a vegetarian. The fact that she worked for wildlife habitat protection AND hunted did not compute for me at all. Now, I get it, and know there are a lot of other dedicated hunter-conservationists out there, too.
P.S. By the way, I agree with your comment on my post. There are many different ways of understanding the larger-than-human-world. Photographers, birdwatchers, biologists, wildlife rescue workers, hunters of various kinds, indigenous shamans, etc, can all gain deep understandings of nature and animals. And sometimes those perspectives and kinds of understandings overlap, even within individual people who happen to fall into several different categories.
btw: Tovar’s been exceptionally courteous, in a social networking kind of way, by not posting any hyperlinks. So, here’s the link to Susan Morse’s work: https://www.keepingtrack.org/index.html. And here’s a sample of her photography, from that same website: https://www.keepingtrack.org/article/view/3206/1/388/index.html.
I’ll see if I can scrounge up links to more of her photos. I have to admit, Tovar, that I’m particularly grateful for efforts on behalf of predator animals, given how much they tend to be in the crosshairs, both literally and figuratively.